Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Not disruptive yet, but the future looks bright

The idea that MOOCs will cause imminent disruption of the higher education market appears frequently in the media. We believe that while this hype creates interest, most large educational institutions will experiment with this form of content but MOOCs will not disrupt education significantly in the near term. Enterprise training and continuing education looks likely to be the fastest adopter of MOOCs, with significant growth in 2014 and 2015.

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Executive summary

MOOCs are a fast-growing trend in the educational landscape. In the short term, MOOCs aren’t a threat to traditional higher education providers, and in fact might never be a threat, even in the long term: MOOCs and traditional education might not be a zero-sum game. People whose primary learning motive is certification might still feel compelled to pay the higher cost of traditional programs. However, providers of MOOCs are branching into new business models. In addition to the revenue from providing fee-based platform services to traditional universities, MOOCs are currently collecting modest fees from certification options, as well as from partnerships with employers to provide targeted learning programs, which might become material in the medium term if the enterprise MOOCs market is the first to take off.